


learn to trust

by Salty_Cro



Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: Character Study, Introspection, M/M, but also relationship-y
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-25
Updated: 2019-10-25
Packaged: 2021-01-03 03:41:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,175
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21172838
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Salty_Cro/pseuds/Salty_Cro
Summary: Indrid doesn't do trust. It's too complicated, too messy, too dangerous. And then he gets to Kepler.





	learn to trust

**Author's Note:**

> fuck the mcelroys. i genuinely can no longer enjoy their content. here's my esoteric bullshit that i couldve made a lot longer but i remembered that nobody cares. amnesty belongs to me now.
> 
> title from "learn to trust" by bad suns

Indrid doesn’t do trust.

It’s just easier on both sides. Indrid isn’t exactly a model of kept promises and honesty. Too many “you’re late”-s and “just leave”-s had proven that plenty of times over. And Indrid finds it too easy to find fault in others to take their word for granted anyway.

This was trivial in Sylvain, where Indrid had status and responsibilities that outweighed his flaky and controversial reputation. Sure, he wasn’t particularly invested in an empire he knew had few centuries left, but it wasn’t as if anyone else could do what he did. Not for long, anyway. 

Getting to Earth was different. Indrid had something he had never had before: anonymity. Among humans he could be anyone, do anything, so long as he didn’t make a scene. That was a struggle sometimes, but he managed. And sure, things were absolutely awful on Earth, but Indrid wasn’t the one responsible for fixing it.

On the other side of that coin was the disbelief. Earth had far less clairvoyant oversight, and that made it hard for Indrid to establish himself. Seeing the future was apparently a bad thing. People ignored him, locked him up in institutions and penitentiaries, and even came after him when his less fortunate predictions came true. That was all before he took his disguise off.

Even the Sylphs Indrid kept up with on Earth didn’t care much for him. One by one, Indrid watched old friendships slip into the couch cushions of the past. He only crosses paths with an awkward old acquaintance or friend-turned-antagonizer every couple of years. Earth was a second chance for everyone, not just Indrid, and not everyone took it as the learning opportunity he did. He is effectively alone.

So no, Indrid really doesn’t do trust.

For a while, it works out. Indrid keeps to himself, pretends to mind his own business, and survives. He survives quite well. New routines, human-like routines, ones that Indrid used to hate, take precedent over the arcane practices he used to be so smug about. Memorizing texts becomes making dinner, nightly flights become trips to the grocery store, artificing becomes finally learning how to clean a bathroom. Indrid knows all these routines down to the second.

He still clings to his eccentricities, though. Dinner is raspberry jam and orange slices sandwiched between two frozen waffles. His closet is full of every era and subgenre fashion ever had the misfortune of favoring. He steals used textbooks from college bookstores to give himself something to do. Just because he learned how to use a magic eraser doesn’t mean he has to give up his curiosity.

His eccentricity becomes a shield, in a way. People know to stay away from Indrid in the way Indrid knows to stay away from them. There is no pretense of a familiar stranger. Indrid gets what he needs from each place and moves on. It’s efficient, it’s simple, and no one gets hurt. As much as it pains Indrid to think it, Woodbridge would be proud.

Indrid keeps moving. New towns, new timelines, new faces he’s pre-forgotten, new risks and rewards, but really it’s all the same. Same off-grey trailer walls and tacky curtains and brand of eggnog. Same anxieties, same boredom, the same boredom because the anxieties are the same. Same difference. Different sameness. It’s safe, but it’s so unsatisfying.

Indrid knows there are forces out there that are more powerful than him, and he feels no need to engage. He knows that wasn’t always true, but what can he say. He doesn’t trust himself to back out if things get dangerous. Some humans have a saying: “curiosity killed the cat, but satisfaction brought it back.” Indrid doesn’t know that he’ll ever be satisfied.

Eventually, Indrid figures out trust. 

He trusts his own magic, he trusts Costco to start stocking eggnog in October, and he trusts his Winnebago to keep itself together if he has to enchant it at gunpoint. These assumptions are safe, because they are always the same. They are more routines. The sameness of routines make them undeniable.

Routines stack on routines like tables full of sketches that Indrid really should have thrown out by now. That’s the one routine he never mastered, throwing out irrelevant visions. Perhaps it’s symbolic, a more wistful part of him things. Perhaps he doesn’t trust that the danger is over.

The routines are only threatened when a place’s strangeness matches or even outweighs Indrid’s own. It rarely happened, in all of Indrid’s travels. A tiny Southern town with no church, a quaint village in rural Vermont, a gas station surrounded entirely by empty desert. Nowhere Indrid needed to stay long. In an out, through and done. Another cycle of the routine.

* * *

And then Indrid makes it to Kepler, West Virginia. His routines are thrown off hard enough to shatter like cheap glass against the laminate floor. With those routines go the trust Indrid had in his life and now he would very much like to leave.

Of course, fate is never on Indrid’s side. 

He shows up to Kepler, a small strange town at the center of two different intergalactic conflicts, and immediately he is confronted with unfamiliar magic. The woman who signs him into the campsite looks at him, and her eyes flash with a golden sheen. This woman doesn’t seem affected by Indrid’s strange aesthetic; more worryingly, it’s as if she recognizes him. Indrid knows that he’s never seen this woman before in his life and flees back to his Winnebago as soon as he can. That woman is not a Sylph nor a cyber-light and so Indrid doesn’t know what she is. He doesn’t know if he wants to know.

A couple days later, a man is killed by the strain of fate’s tapestry being twisted off its hook. Indrid had never dealt with this powerful a force before, and he is beginning to regret abandoning his arcane studies. Divination of the future is already difficult enough on its own, but to be able to manipulate it on such a scale? At the very least, Indrid would like to know the chronological physics involved.

Indrid does know that the people in town that he came to talk to are already doing their best. He also knows their best will not be enough, at least without his involvement. And Indrid has not gotten involved in a long time. Involvement means helping. Helping means trusting.

But things get worse, as they are known to do. More people die. Indrid gets involved. He meets the heroes of the story of Kepler and he gives them their quest. He tests his limits with trust. The heroes trust him enough to take the quest. He trusts them enough to complete it. Less people die. 

Things change. Fate changes. Indrid thinks he might change.

The results are good but the experiment is unethical. Lives are on the line. Then Indrid gets seen when he gets involved and now he’s on the line.  _ Results inconsistent _ , he rules. Not the same, not routine, not safe. So much for trusting. 

Whatever is controlling fate notices that Indrid noticed it. Indrid notices the noticing. He notices it’s the second time he’s been noticed within a week when he usually goes years between. He notices that something else is changing the timelines. That something is a man that Indrid can talk to. Indrid talks to him. The man notices him. Indrid (for one singular moment) trusts him.

Indrid spends so much time noticing other change that he forgets to notice the change in his home. And then Indrid wakes up on the snowy ground of a too-familiar forest. How many routines did he break? Before he can determine the answer, the man he trusted punches him in the face. The worst part is Indrid trusted him to do it.

Indrid thinks he might trust the man even more, but the fight is still going. Indrid sticks to the one routine he still has because  _ no, actually, running away is good, and there’s a reason I do it.  _ He is no stranger to running. He doesn’t trust the ground under his feet.

* * *

But there was someone Indrid trusted, more than he had trusted anyone in a long time, if only for a handful of moments. That scares him a lot, so much that he is curious. The man was force enough to change fate and from the looks of it, it wasn’t the first time. Indrid doesn’t have the self control to back out now that he’s curious. He thinks this man might hold satisfaction. And by Sylvain does Indrid need to be brought back.

So Indrid brings himself back. For the first time since he started this eternal roadtrip, he stops at the same place twice. Intentionally. Breaking his routine. He is trusting this place to still be there, to be like he remembers it, to still let him in.

Indrid comes back and he is curious and he is scared and he hopes he will be satisfied. He is going out on a quaking ash limb of trust and he’s never been happier to weigh practically nothing. Indrid wastes no time in seeking out the oak branch of the one person he already trusted. Duck Newton. If Indrid can trust him he can let himself say the man’s name. 

Now, it is the middle of the night and Duck is clearly unsure what Indrid is doing there, but he seems to trust Indrid. Duck intrinsically trusts Indrid. Indrid wonders how he does it.

“What brings you here? Kepler in general, and, uh, my apartment, at, let’s see… 2:41 AM,” Duck asks.

“I’m sorry,” Indrid realizes, not only the time but the truth. He is genuinely apologetic for waking Duck up. That’s new.

“Nah, you’re good. I mean, serves me right for hitting you,” Duck says. His voice is thick and raspy like wind through oak leaves. Indrid decides to stop with the tree comparisons before he dives freely from his own bough. 

“You were supposed to,” Indrid replies, when he remembers he’s in the middle of a conversation. He’s been thinking about Duck’s actions for weeks, but he knows Duck has more important things to think about than someone who trusted him.

“I was?” Duck trusts him.

Indrid nods. “Unpleasant as it was, it was the best possible outcome. Do you still have my glasses, by the way?”

“Oh shit, yeah, here ya go.” Duck hands over the glasses. Duck keeps his word. Almost like he’s trustworthy. 

Indrid makes the executive decision to trust Duck.

Time passes, and for all his muscles Duck doesn’t seem to be able to break Indrid’s trust. Indrid is almost impressed. Usually by now people have at least tried to lie to him. Indrid has seen the man attempt a lie. It wasn’t pretty. Duck never tries it on Indrid.

Indrid has not trusted anyone in a while, and he forgets exactly what it means. Friendship, usually. Duck feeds him and confides in him and helps him and asks him for help. They build routines around each other, with each other. The trust is mutual.

More time passes, more things happen, more trust grows. Indrid learns to trust more people. Someone carrying part of Sylvain in her heart. A compulsive liar. A rival cryptid. A mother. A fellow artist. A snowboarder.

Trusting becomes a third nature to Indrid. Trust becomes the baseline. Things start stacking on top of that baseline. Namely with one Duck Newton. Indrid has trusted Duck with his mind for some time. Now he’s beginning to trust him with his heart.

“I’m in love with you,” Indrid says out of the blue one day. Words are easy. Indrid says a lot of them, usually as soon as they cross his mind.

Duck looks up from his spot on the couch. “Really?”

Indrid knows that this is not distrust but simply disbelief. “Yes.”

“Shit, Indrid, I’m in love with you too, I have been for a while,” Duck says.

Now it’s Indrid’s turn to disbelieve. “Really?”

“Yeah,” Duck laughs. He hops off the couch and approaches Indrid. “I just thought, y’know, you weren’t there yet.”

“I’m here now,” Indrid says, and he’s hit with the strangeness of that. He is trusting the concept of “here” and “now” to mean good things.

“You sure are.” Duck kisses him.

This is new, this is not routine, this not the same, but it is so satisfying. Indrid kisses back; while the curve of Duck’s neck is foreign territory to his hands, it is worth every moment of uncertainty. 

Duck holds him tight and steady and gives him a new sameness, no, a new stability, something Indrid had not experienced in far too long. And Indrid loves him. And Indrid trusts him. And Indrid does not know exactly how this will work out, but he is satisfied with the knowledge that Duck loves him. If there is one thing Indrid can trust, it’s Duck’s ability to love.


End file.
